A fellow vaudevillian, Houdini, gave Buster his nickname for an incredible fall he did down a flight of prop stairs as a child. Under Mack Sennett, unsentimental Keaton brought the art of pure, dead-pan comedy to its greatest artistic and financial height - a Keaton feature cost about $200,000 and grossed $2 million. But "The Great Stone Face," and gravely voice unsuited to talkies, began to fade in the 1930's. He had a few staring parts until 1937, and in 1952, in Chaplin's "Limelight", he did one of the funniest slapstick bits in film history. Recently on TV Keaton hurt himself in a rare re-enactment of an old two-reeler and though he was near death for days, he is now completely recovered. 
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An exhausted Keaton, in the Cameraman (1928) leans without expression against a cop after being trampled by a parade and beaten in a tong war.
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